Chief Delphi - View Single Post

David Brinza · #25 22-09-2009, 20:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Wikipedia has a reasonable article on teacher merit pay at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_pay. Without getting in to the argument here, I would just suggest that like most stories, there are two sides to this one.

I will also suggest that $5 billion might not be such a crazy amount of money to spread across the United States. There are roughly 50 million K-12 students in the USA, so that is only about $100 per student. Even the larger figure of $100 billion for education... which really is a staggering number... is not so large when the overall size of the education system is considered, especially if it is spread across several years.

I hope the money is spent wisely. I might be biased, but I do consider education to be more of an investment than an expenditure.

Jason

I also hope the money is spent wisely, but I'm not so optimistic that the best investments will be made with these funds.

For example: a local high school, struggling to meet API scores, "invests" in a new artificial surface football field. Meanwhile, the CAD teacher cannot get computers that runs the CAD program, so the class is little more than study-hall. What is the Board of Education thinking???